'AI Training At Level Never Seen Before': Microsoft CEO Unveils 'World's Most Powerful' Data Centre

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced that the tech giant has built the "world's most powerful data centre", named 'Fairwater', in the United States' Wisconsin.

Nadella unveiled the data centre through a post on social media platform X, and said that "it will deliver 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today". It will also enable AI training and inference workloads at a level never seen before.

These data centres are built to power Microsoft AI, Open AI, Copilot and other AI workloads, according to a blog post by Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud+AI branch of Microsoft.

Nadella said that Fairwater is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times.

A single Nvidia GB200 contains 36 superchips with 72 graphical processing units and 36 central processing units within a liquid-cooled rack-scale system.

The structure is intended to function like a supercomputer powered by "hundreds and thousands" of AI accelerators that can trains AI models in tandem. It is capable of processing 865,000 tokens per second, "the highest throughput of any cloud platform available today," according to the blog post.

The data centre will utilise a customised cooling apparatus that is built to address concerns around copious usage of water to cool data centres, leading to concern around the environmental costs for the same.

"The data centre uses a liquid-cooled closed-loop system for cooling its graphics processing units that requires zero water for operations after construction," Nadella said.

According to the blog post, over 90% of data centre capacity uses this closed-loop system, and requires water only once during construction which it reuses continuously without any evaporation losses.

The remaining 10% of traditional servers utilise outdoor air for cooling, and will switch to water only during the hottest days.

The blog post called it "a design that dramatically reduces water usage compared to traditional data centres."

Nadella further spoke about opening similar data centres in other locations, saying this would not be the only such centre.

"And of course, it is just one of several similar sites we’re lighting up across our 70+ regions. We have multiple identical Fairwater data centres under construction in other locations across the US, in addition to our AI infrastructure already deployed in over 100 data centres around the world, powering model training, test-time compute, reinforcement learning tuning, and real-time inference at global scale," Nadella said.